Data Management Topics

Data Management and Curation

This page highlights resources for IASSIST members on the topics of good practice, standards, and activity in Data Management and Curation. Explore all the resources or limit the view to a particular topic by clicking on a tag name.

The website is designed to be service-oriented. Four sections, Learn; Plan; Share and Find guide users to the RDM advice and systems solutions that meet their current needs. The Learn section includes a DataGuide (CC BY 3.0) - a quick standalone guide developed to get people started on Research Data Management, which could be re-used and adapted.

The website also features the library's current systems offerings for managing research data, including the UBC instance of Dataverse (http://dvn.library.ubc.ca/dvn/) and UBC Library's digital preservation system, cIRcle.

e-Science Portal for New England Librarians has been gathering comprehensive resources links to keep librarians updated about e-Science issues and library's new roles and functions. There is a "Data Management" section of the portal gathering publications, guides, tools, and other resources falling under the following general data management topics:

The New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum (NECDMC)is an instructional tool for teaching data management best practices to undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers in the health sciences, sciences, and engineering disciplines. Each of the curriculum’s seven online instructional modules aligns with the National Science Foundation’s data management plan recommendations and addresses universal data management challenges. Included in the curriculum is a collection of actual research cases that provides a discipline specific context to the content of the instructional modules. These cases come from a range of research settings such as clinical research, biomedical labs, an engineering project, and a qualitative behavioral health study. Additional research cases will be added to the collection on an ongoing basis. Each of the modules can be taught as a stand-alone class or as part of a series of classes. Instructors are welcome to customize the content of the instructional modules to meet the learning needs of their students and the policies and resources at their institutions.

Built upon the Frameworks of a Data Management Curriculum developed by the Lamar Soutter Library and the George C. Gordon Library at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the NECDMC is designed to address present and future researchers’ data management learning needs.

The Purdue University Libraries, partnered with the libraries of the University of Minnesota, the University of Oregon and Cornell University, led this project to help raise awareness of research data management and curation issues among rresearchers, through developing and implementing data information literacy (DIL) instruction programs for graduate students. The website of the project has gathered updated information and development of the researcher interview instruments, the data management training curriculum, as well as research publications result from the project.

Data Management Plan (DMP) Editor is an open source desktop application to assist researchers preparing data management plans as required by funding agencies for projects involving data collection. The software comes packaged with sample templates for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes for Health (NIH) in the US, and the Digital Curation Center in the UK.

The OM DMP Editor is very easy to install and use. It has two primary functions: 1) to assist researchers in the preparation of basic Data Management Plans at the funding application stage, and 2) to help build and maintain a more detailed DMP during the project’s lifetime. These generated plans can then be exported to DDI XML and published in human-readable formats like PDF, HTML, etc. The published reports and the XML are used for internal management as well as for reporting to funding agencies.

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) website
has a new section devoted to Data Management and Curation, which provides a
general guide on research data quality, preservation, access, confidentiality, and
citation, and also explains how ICPSR, as a social science research data
archive, is working hard to address all these issues. There is also a Tools
& Services section compiling recommended applications that could help
researchers deal with data confidentiality, restricted-use data, data
processing, and dissemination.

In January
2014, ACRL/Numeric and Spatial Data Interest Group invited ICPSR’s Director of
Curation Services, Jared Lyle, to offer a webinar for data librarians on the
subject of social science data management and curation. The slides and recording
of the webinar are available for viewing now.

The benefits of funder-required data management planning should apply to all research data

Research and Compliance Offices, IT, Academic units, the Library, and Researchers should be involved in setting policy

An entrepreneurial person may need to get things going—why not the library director?

Starting the Conversation: University-wide Research Data Management Policy is a call for action that summarizes the benefits of systemic data management planning and identifies the stakeholders and their concerns. It also suggests that the library proactively initiate a conversation among these stakeholders to get buy-in for a high-level, responsible data planning and management policy that is proactive, rather than reactive, and is also supported and sustainable.

The Stakeholders identified in the report include:

The University

The Office of Research

The Research Compliance Office

The Information Technology Department

The Researchers

The Academic Units

The Library

The intended audience for this call for action is library directors, not because they alone can make this happen, but to encourage them to initiate the conversation. The bulk of the document advocates for the library director to initiate a conversation among the stakeholders and addresses the various topics that should be discussed. A checklist of issues is also provided to help the discussion result in a supportable and sustainable policy.

Suggested elements of the conversation include:

Who owns the data?

What Requirements are Imposed By Others?

Which Data Should Be Retained?

For How Long Should Data Be Maintained?

How Should Digital Data Be Preserved?

Are there Ethical Considerations?

How are Data Accessed?

How Open Should the Data Be?

How Will Costs Be Managed?

What are the Alternatives to Local Data Management?

Library directors are invested not only because their libraries may be recipients of data in need of curation and of requests for guidance, but more importantly because library staff have significant skills and experience to contribute to the discussion. This is an opportunity for the library director to play an entrepreneurial role in furthering the mission of the larger enterprise.

This report was made possible by the contributions and support of the following members of the OCLC Research Library Partnership Data Curation Policy Working Group whose broad range of experience and perspectives was invaluable:

Several organizations have begun compiling lists of
repositories of research data. These can
be useful for researchers both to consider where to deposit their data, as well
as for discovery for secondary data use.

Tool to identify repositories of research data. Users can search (including field-level
searching) or browse by subject or title.
Each entry provides a description, standardized subjects, access, start
date, and country, among other qualities.
Anyone is able to suggest or edit repository listings, which then are
reviewed and committed by an editorial board.
This is the same list that is re-displayed on the DataCite web site. Hosted by the Purdue University Libraries.

Project whose goal it is to create a global registry of
research data repositories. Database can
be searched or browsed (by subject, content type, or country). Each entry provides a description and is
tagged with standardized subjects, content types, and countries, as well as
information on institutions, terms/policies, and standards. Managed by the re3data.org Project Consortium
with initial funding from the German Research
Foundation DFG.

Simple listing of repositories and databases for data. Single page lists repositories by subject
category and provides a brief description and links. Users can add or annotate entries. Part of the Open Access Directory, hosted by
the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College.

IASSIST Quarterly

Special issue: A pioneer data librarianWelcome
to the special volume of the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ (37):1-4, 2013).
This special issue started as exchange of ideas between Libbie
Stephenson and Margaret Adams to collect